Her

After finishing my first screening of Spike Jonze new film Her, I felt very effected, almost devastated.  I don't mean devastated as in crestfallen or depressed, because Her is not a depressing film, I only mean emotionally present.  Her, like Adaptation, confirms for me that Spike Jonze is a blossoming master, someone that can speak to my heart and my head at the same time, exciting both and making neither secondary.

First, the film is beautiful, imagining a utopian, idealized future.  Skyscrapers are everywhere in this future, with immaculate gardens and reflecting pools everywhere, an upper-middle class urban heaven.  Big brother is never mentioned, though the ways in which society in the film has allowed the digital encroach on the social would seem to invite comparisons to Orwell's dystopia of 1984.  This film isn't about that, this film is about love.

As the film opens, Theodore Twembly (Joaquin Phoenix) sits at his desk writing love notes for other people, a perfect job for the romantic sad sack that he is.  His fortunes in love soon change, however, when he buys the newest operating system, which after asking him some basic questions, gives itself the name Samantha and Scarlett Johanson's sexy voice, causing him to fall madly in love with it.

This could be a joke, a gag played for laughs, but we understand.  In what is perhaps the film's greatest trick, I stopped thinking of her as an operating system, but as a person like any other.  The film is populated with compelling and entertaining characters and performances.  Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, and Amy Adams all turn in very nice supporting performances, but it's it's Phoenix's show, and his emotions are raw and real.

The relationship between Theodore and Samantha is the film's focus, and it has ups, downs, complexities and complications ad naseum, just like a real relationship.  Scarlett Johanson's Samantha is fantastically sensitive, imaginative, and sexy.  Despite the fact that it is a computer, and thus has no true personality, Theodore falls in love with it, and so did I.

War Horse

                As a film, in the way D.W. Griffith might have imagined them, War Horse, the new Steven Spielberg epic war drama-slash-coming-of-age story-slash-amazing-animal tall tale, is a near perfect piece of filmmaking.  To me, however, under-educated film-lover that I am, it was, for the most part, boring.  At 146 minutes, it’s by no means overlong, but 146 minutes is a long time to be repeating one phrase to yourself: “who gives a shit about a fucking horse?”

                In the film’s opening scene, this goddamn animal is born in an open field of pristine, almost Technicolor grass.  Where is this field?  The rolling, remarkably beautiful green hills with the uniform clusters of trees seemed, at least to me, to belong to some past that exists only in our minds.  Even the dialog and the characterization are too perfect, as if all these people dropped out of the sky with their lives planned and their lines memorized.  Even Emily Watson, as smart and capable a performer as she’s always been, is swallowed up in the story.

Every actor, every character in this story, is smothered in the archetype their meant to fill out.  David Thewlis plays the wicked landlord, who laughs, saying that that horse will never be able to plow a field.  Peter Mullan plays the family’s drunken patriarch, who pays far too much for a horse that seems to have no practical use on a farm.  And Jeremy Irvine, as the boy who never stops believing that his horse can do it.

With all this said, War Horse is not simply a drab retelling of an age-old tale.  Spielberg’s camera is as vibrant as ever, and gets full room to roam during a truly rousing battle sequence.  However, these positives were not enough to make me give a shit about this fucking horse.

2 stars

Moneyball

Moneyball: a husband’s prayers are answered
    “Moneyball,” the new immensely entertaining film treatment of Michael Lewis’s best seller, answers many questions, not all of which have the least bit to do with baseball.  In fact, I’d say that none of the questions it answers are about baseball at all, but rather about film, philosophy, and finally marriage.  The first question, pretty obviously, is “how can you turn a nonfiction tome about baseball statistics, praised and influential as it may be, into a compelling film?”
    The answer to the first question may also seem obvious: populate it with great, likeable actors, starting with Brad Pitt.  As the film’s protagonist, A’s General manager Billy Beane, Pitt is on screen for 93 percent of the film (this figure is absolutely correct), and you’ll wonder why he wasn’t on screen for 97 percent.  Jonah Hill (Superbad), Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation), and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (um, Boogie Nights?) round out the cast, packing the film with hilariously droll line readings, making it the funniest nonfiction novel/turned film since America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard was turned into “The Sting.”
    A philosophical question the film poses and offers an answer to is “are statistics better than experience and intuition?”  The answer “Moneyball” posits is “yes, they are.”  A number of flashbacks throughout the film illustrate how Beane (Pitt) came to his new statistical baseball philosophy, showing how the old baseball approach to scouting and evaluating talent crushed his own dreams of playing in the big leagues.  The flashback sequences give Beane’s story a solid emotional base, and make it likely to attract a female audience. . .
    The final question “Moneyball” answers is simple, “How can I talk to my wife about baseball statistics?”  When I saw the movie, the theater was packed, largely with older couples.  And when flow charts of baseball statistics flashed on the screen, the theater was abuzz with whispering, from wives asking “what does OBP mean?” to husbands answering”. . . and it’s so important because-” such that I gave the couple behind me more than a few acid-tinged glances.  So if you want to observe a crew of great actors making a very good script into a riotously entertaining film, think about think about the conflict of analysis vs. inspiration, or just talk to your wife about something you care about for once, “Moneyball is definitely the film for you.
3 1/2 stars

Our Idiot Brother

                I’ve seen the truth and I understand it now; Paul Rudd is the most charming actor in the world.  Rudd transforms “Our Idiot Brother,” an exercise that could have been stinted and lame, a comedy filled with pot humor and George Carlin’s hippy-dippy weatherman voice into an actual film about an actual character.  True, Rudd’s character is perhaps the only sympathetic element of a story filled with pain and deceit, but his charisma in the end carries it through, and we’re all better off.

                The film begins with Rudd trying to give some weed to a uniformed police officer and going to jail, a development Rudd’s character his character, as with everything, takes in stride.  When he’s out, however, his girlfriend (Francesca Papalia), the first in this character’s catalog of craven’s who take advantage of him, has taken his organic farm, and kicks him out.  He moves in first with his mother (Shirley Knight), a degenerate alcoholic, and then one of his sister’s, which is when the film takes a dark turn.

                Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) is completely career obsessed and her best aspects are contained in the funny performance of Adam Scott, her would-be boyfriend, Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) is a wannabe comedian who cheats on her partner with the artist who paints her in the nude, and Liz (Emily Mortimer) is completely blind to her husband (Steve Coogan, apparently hollywood’s go to British scent, though he could do so much more)’s infidelity and general shittyness.  These aren’t fun characters.  I, for one, didn’t care if all their marriages broke up, and that’s the films greatest weakness: it assumes you will care, and gives no incentive to concern yourselves with these characters.

                But this only means that there is a service for Rudd to apply, and he does so with aplomb.  He’s on screen for almost the entire film, and it’s not enough, his character makes you forgive every other character’s selfishness, because soon he’ll say something else, and all will be better.  When the movie reaches its conclusion, everyone’s happy, and that seems a little false, but Rudd is making candles now, is reunited with his faithful companion Willie Nelson (his dog), and it’s all funny.

Our Idiot Brother: 3 stars

Fright Night

“Fright Night” review

            I should say, as I begin my review of the new slam-bang horror semi-blockbuster “Fright Night,” that I am not a fan of the horror genre.  I do not take joy in cries of pain, and I am particularly put-off by the new brand of American torture-porn exemplified in the Saw series.  However, as I was pleased to discover in the theater, Fright Night is not a horror movie, at least not purely.

            Fright Night is, at heart, an action movie.  Most horror movies, or the ones that I’ve seen at least, are largely buildup.  There’s something scary across the street, no there isn’t, yes there is, no there isn’t, yes there is, no there isn’t, oh no here it comes!  While this series of false starts normally lasts for the majority of the movie, in Fright Night, it lasts a maximum of twenty minutes, and the rest of the running time is mostly just a series of action set pieces.

            But don’t worry, the building tension has its own revelatory component, the horrific, sinister, hilarious, gleeful performance of Colin Farrel.  I howled with laughter and glowed with admiration when Farrel caught the protagonist (Anton Yelchin) in his gaze, held him steady, and warned of “Bad.  People. Charlie.”  Every moment Farrel is on the screen was a joy.

            As for the other performances in the film, I would say that they are serviceable, but not really any more.  None of them truly charmed me, not even Christopher Mintz-Plasse (of Mclovin fame) or David Tennant (of Dr. Who fame), who were each overpowered by Farrel’s magnum charisma.  However, in the film’s second half, all performances are drowned out by the movement of the camera and the excitement of the violence.  When a car comes from nowhere and slams into shot, the camera immediately flips to the side, giving a panoramic view of the chaos as a hand reaches from beyond the frame and gropes for a victim, and then just as quickly refocuses on the road behind it.

            Despite incredible artistic set pieces like the one just mentioned, I’d say that this film far from perfect, as evidenced by its disregard for physics and its tenuous hold to traditional vampire lore.  Speaking on that, I know that in Dracula aversion to sunlight and a steak through the heart are described, I’ve never heard of super strength or body dysmorphia being elements of vampire myth.  Thin characterization and nonsense aside, Fright Night is so much fun you’ll never care.

3 stars